Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research, said Ethereum could rise to $40,000 by 2030 and outperform Bitcoin along the way. He argued that the next wave of tokenization, the growth of stablecoins and the buildout of institutional blockchains will likely land on Ethereum first.
Speaking in a Galaxy interview Together with John Gillen, Kendrick linked his ETH thesis directly to the way traditional finance approaches on-chain infrastructure. His argument was not that Ethereum is winning because of narrative momentum, but because it appears to be the safest place for banks, asset managers and large institutions to start building.
Why Ethereum could outperform Bitcoin
In January, Kendrick had published a report titled Ethereum Outperformance Expected. In the interview, he acknowledged that ETH has struggled on price since then, but said the underlying setup remains intact. “The interesting part here for Ethereum is that if tradfi gets involved, it’s fine for tradfi to build things on Ethereum,” he said. “It’s very safe to say I’m going to build on Ethereum layer one, right? Because it’s never gone down. So I think a lot of this stuff is happening primarily on Ethereum layer 1.”
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He pointed to BlackRock’s rollout strategy as a model for how that adoption could unfold. According to Kendrick, institutions will likely launch on the Ethereum mainnet first and expand to other chains and layer-2s later. That order matters because he sees activity flowing into the network before value spreads elsewhere.
Kendrick said he increasingly sees protocol and application fees relative to market cap as one of the most useful ways to think about ETH’s valuation. According to him, more activity in the Ethereum ecosystem should translate into a higher token price. “I think this means that ETH is performing better now, let’s say for the foreseeable future,” he said. He added that the ETH/BTC ratio, which according to his view is currently around 0.03, could rise to 0.04 this year. Longer term, he said, “I’ll have $500,000 Bitcoin in 2030 and $40,000 Ethereum in 2030. So huge outperformance, obviously, huge absolute potential upside from here on out.”
The broader driver behind this call is tokenization. Kendrick said stablecoins could rise from about $300 billion today to $2 trillion in the coming years, arguing this would create huge demand for tokenized money market funds. He said corporate treasurers don’t want to hold only tokenized cash if the rest of their idle capital remains trapped in slower off-chain systems.
“If you want to access stablecoins tomorrow for their 24/7 instant, virtually free benefits, you’re going to want to take all that million dollars onchain,” Kendrick said. “You don’t want to get out of stablecoins and go back to idiotic fiat, which is ridiculously slow in comparison. Instead, you would want to have all your off-chain money market funds onchain as well.”
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That leads to one of his bigger numerical calls. Tokenized money market funds, which he said are worth about $10 billion today, could reach $750 billion by the end of 2028. He based that on the assumption that even if only 10% of transactions were converted into stablecoins over the next few years, a similar portion of money market fund exposure would likely need to come on-chain as well. He also predicted that other tokenized assets could grow from about $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, which he describes as a 50x move in three years.
From there, Kendrick sees a path to DeFi. As regulatory clarity improves, he says, traditional finance and DeFi could begin to meet in the middle, with consumer-facing apps using blockchain rails in the background to route money to products like Aave, Morpho or Compound. “There’s tremendous financial justice and financial inclusion that I think we’re returning to from DeFi,” he said. “Most people won’t know where it comes from, but I think you’ll get that kind of thing in the coming years.”
For Kendrick, that is the core of Ethereum trading. As tokenized dollars, tokenized funds, and ultimately tokenized stocks attract institutional liquidity across the chain, the first phase of that build will likely occur where compliance teams feel most comfortable. In his story that still points to Ethereum.
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $2,059.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com